Phoebe Chen 

(they/them)

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Bio

I’m currently a 5th year Ph.D. student in Psychology working with David Poeppel at New York University. I’m interested in how we construct meaning from language. My research investigates the relationship between semantic properties of words and events and their cognitive consequences such as creating new concepts and false memories.

Education

 Ph.D. in Cognition and Perception (expected in Summer 2025)
New York University

B.A. in Neuroscience
Wesleyan University



Research

How do we form memories from stories?


  • What kind of spontaneous false memories arise in recalls and why?
         Poster (Cog Neuro Society, 2025)

  • How do we quantify memory accuracy in story recalls?
         Paper (Sci Data, 2024)
          Code

  • What insights can we draw from human memory research for LLMs?
    Poster (NeurIPS MemARI, 2022)
         Paper





 

How do we create new concepts in language?

  • What contributes to the hidden meaning in compound nouns in humans and LLMs (e.g., orange juice means juice “made from” oranges)?
    Poster
      Code        
      Paper  (Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 2023)

  • How do we extract and memorize conceptual relations between words?
        Paper  (Cog Sci Society, 2023)

  • How do we process the internal structure of verbs?
         (in prep)








What does brain-to-brain synchrony tell us about interpersonal dynamics?

I helped creating a Python package (github, paper) for inter-brain EEG/fNIRs data analysis and led the development of an app (github, paper) for real-time inter-brain synchrony visualization.

The app was used in large-scale art installations (e.g., Ondas, the Mutural Wave Machine), which allows for usage of crowdsourced neural data in scientific research.

Using data collected from a participatory art piece, I examined the relationship between trait mindfulness and dyadic neural synchrony (Frontiers in Neuropsychology,  2021).





Publications

 In prep/review

  • Chen, P.*, Raccah, O.*, Vy, V.A., Gureckis, T.M., Poeppel, D,. (in preparation) Understanding spontaneous false memory in the naturalistic recall of narratives. 

  • Chen, P., Marantz, A., Poeppel, D. (in preparation) Processing and memory of eventive and stative verbs.

  • Cheng, X., Zhang, R., Chen, P., Cheng, F., Dikker, S., & Pan, Y. (in preparation) Promoting social connectedness through multi-person neurofeedback.


Published

  • Chen, P.*, Raccah, O.*, Gureckis, T.M., Poeppel, D. and Vo, V.A., (2024). The “Naturalistic Free Recall” dataset: four stories, hundreds of participants, and high-fidelity transcriptions. Scientific Data, 11(1), pp.1-9.

  • Chen, P., Poeppel, D., & Zuanazzi, A. (2024). Meaning creation in novel noun-noun compounds: humans and language models. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience.

  • Cao, W., Raccah, O., Chen, P., & Poeppel, D. (2023). Thematic relations outperform taxonomic relations in a cued recall task. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 45, No. 45).

  • Raccah, O., Chen, P., Willke, T. L., Poeppel, D., & Vo, V. A. (2022). Memory in humans and deep language models: Linking hypotheses for model augmentation. NeurIPS Workshops

  • Chen, P., Hendrikse, S., Sargent, K., Romani, M., Oostrik, M., Wilderjans, T. F., Koole, S., Dumas, G., Medine, D., & Dikker, S. (2021). Hybrid Harmony: A Multi-Person Neurofeedback Application for Interpersonal Synchrony. Frontiers in Neuroergonomics

  • Chen, P., Kirk, U., and Dikker, S. (2021). Trait mindfulness predicts inter-brain coupling during naturalistic face-to-face interactions. Frontiers in Neuropsychology

  • Ayrolles, A., Brun, F., Chen, P., Djalovski, A., Beauxis, Y., Delorme, R., Bourgeron, T., Dikker, S., & Dumas, G. (2020). HyPyP: a Hyperscanning Python Pipeline for inter-brain connectivity analysis. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience